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Country - Iceland
Firsthand Experience? - Yes

Cost of Living - 5 - It used to be a 1 being one of the most expensive places in the world but the recent bank crash devalued the icelandic krona by 50% so suddenly it started being reasonable for tourists. Lately though inflation has taken it's toll and prices are creeping back up again.

Recreation - 7 - Very good partying scene in Reykjavik, but mostly centered around fridays and saturdays with bars open until very late. Other days of the week bars close at 1. Almost zero pay-4-play scene if that's your thing. Lots of cold activities like hiking, snowmobiling etc. but surprisingly few options for skiing.

How Scary - 10 - One of the safest places with the lowest murder rates in the world. The police don't even carry guns. Most people speak decent english.

Poker Playing - 7 - The laws are very fuzzy. There has been an explosion of live poker in Iceland and the police seem to not care. It's likely due to the fact that one live tournament got busted by the police in 2007, but the D.A. decided it wasn't worth pursuing so since then live poker has become de-facto legal. You won't find many high stakes games and it's almost 90% No limit, mostly 1/2 - 5/10 NL.

There's very good internet everywhere and no legal problems with playing online (so far).

How Easy to Get There and Stay There? - 7 - Iceland is a major hub for transatlantic flights so it's very easy to fly there, about 5 hours from East coast US and 3-4 from Western Europe. Since I'm a native I'm not quite sure what the visa situation is for foreigners.

Seoul, Republic of Korea

Experience Stationed and lived for two years as a member of the US Army at Yongsan Garrison downtown Seoul, right between Samgakji and Noksapyeong Stations on the 6 line.

Cost of Living: 3 The big issue here are the massive security deposits it takes to rent a place. "Key money," as it's called, is required on nearly every rental and one can expect to pay at least 20,000usd just to move into a decent 2 bedroom in the city. In nice places it can be more. 50,000usd is not uncommon. That said, you get it back when you move out just like a security deposit. It's just that a lot of travelers don't possess that kind of available money.

As far as food is concerned it's cheap and plentiful. Street food is available, edible, and cheap. Also delicious and clean from my perspective. Beers and coffee have similar prices to any big city in USA. Expect to pay ~4usd for a local beer up to ~10usd for an import (bottles, draughts, whatever.) Public trans is cheap, clean and easy. It's about 1usd for an average ride on the subway/bus and you can use both. Taxis are extremely available and you can ride across town for less than 20usd unless it's rush hour.

Recreation: 9 Nightlife in Seoul is unbelievable. Huge open shopping malls. Tons of live music of varying style and quality. Everything from the highest end booking clubs (which I promise you can't afford) to the lowest end dive bars (where you will likely be hanging out with many American service members and hippy expat teachers.)

Two specific districts I wish to mention: 1)Hongdae, which sits right between three very prestigious Korean Universities (including the amazing Ewha Women's University where I swear 75% of the women are hot) is a huge area of bar after bar after karaoke joint after bar after restaurant after coffee shop after bar. Live music everywhere. And it isn't expensive.

2) Hyewha: More of an artsy district farther north with several blues cafes and bars of that ilk. Lots of fun to hang around in most nights. Lots of dates going on here at all times. More cultured than the sheer madness of Hongdae yet still a ton of fun.

I only knock Seoul 1 point because of the lack of available beaches, but you can be in Pusan in 3 hours by KTX and use their beaches all you want. Also Jeju island is only a 1 hour flight away and though it was barren when I was there it was still a perfect place to have holiday as long as you're bringing your own company.

How Scary: 9 Clean and safe everywhere. Even if you're stupid you're likely to not find too much trouble. Minority groups may run into problems with elitist locals but they would sooner ignore you than start something. Tons of English spoken in Seoul at the lowest levels. Tons more spoken around the Universities. Police are conscripted 20 year olds for the most part and are everywhere. Only illegal drug I saw in two years was hash. You have to go looking pretty hard for trouble to find it in Seoul.

Poker Playing: B&M: 2 Online: 8 Walker Hill is the casino with the live games but the rake is absurd. Game can vary on juiciness. Online isn't so hard to play. I played stars for 2 years there and never had one issue. Fulltilt isn't accommodated and you need to have it installed before you go. If you do there aren't problems using it. Never tried Ongame or Party.

How Easy to Get There and Stay There: 5 Super easy if you're in the military and on orders. If not, it can be a bit of a pain. I know it's fairly easy to do consecutive 90 day stays. After that I'm not sure. I know visas can be hard to come by. You essentially need to be sponsored by a company from what I've been told. And that process can entail background checks out the ass. Thailand and Philippines are much more accommodating here but it's not awful.

+1, especially for bigger countries, these numbers can vary a lot from city to city.

Lima, Peru

Cost of Living - Biggest expense will be rent. 600USD(everything included) will get you a decent, furnished place for one person/a couple in the main tourist district called Miraflores. 900USD will get you a decent place for two people. You can get way cheaper places in some not so nice neighbourhoods, but I don't really see the point of living somewhere where you can't walk around safely at night. There a several other neighbourhoods besides Miraflores where you are safe - the prices are probably going to be around the same as in Miraflores.
Food prices are very cheap compared to where I'm from(Scandi) - probably something like 75% cheaper in supermarkets. Tons of very cheap and very good places to eat out - $2-$3 two course lunches available pretty much everywhere.

Recreation - Lots of nightlife in Miraflores with both locals and tourists, a bunch of historic sites around the city(historical center in downtown, some old pre-inka ruins), decent beaches, surfing, a good part of the coast-line near the nice neighbourhoods are made into recreational areas which is nice, since Lima isn't abundant with parks like BsAs for instance.
Cuzco or Arequipa is a ~1½ hour flight away if you want to see some mountains, ruins, do some hiking or rafting. In general Peru is just loaded with amazing places both in the mountains and the Amazonas. I don't think it can really be beat when it comes to stuff like that.

How Scary? - Miraflores and the up-scale districts are safe both day and night. Some of the less up-scale districts are not so safe at night, and a whole bunch of the poorer districts are not safe at all for a gringo at any time of the day.
In general it seems like the Peruvians like to take good care of the tourists, so while travelling to various parts of Peru they have a bunch of safeguards in place to make sure nothing bad happens. You'll still get ripped off if you're a tourist fish, but most likely you'll be safe in pretty much every touristy place.

Poker Playing - Online: I don't think anyone cares what you do if you're here on a tourist visa and keep your money in a bank account outside of Peru. Personally I wouldn't want to deal with South American banking in general, so if you can keep your banking biz in your home country I would much prefer that. Internet connections, while not extremely fast, seem to be solid and reliable.
Live: There are plenty of B&M casinos in Miraflores with NL games. Usually it's 5/5 or 5/10 soles(2/2 or 2/4 USD) and once in a while there'll be a 5/10 USD game going somewhere. That seems to be a rare occurrence though.
Most casinos also have tourneys going through-out the week. LAPT has a stop here in April if you're into tourney poker.
There's a thread about poker in Lima somewhere, where a dude posted a link to his blog which he updates regularly with info about the live scene.

How Easy to Get There and Stay There? - Jorge Chavez Int'l Airport in Lima(Callao actually, but only 20 mins from Lima) has connections to a bunch of European and North American destinations. I've seen regular deals to and from the US, while flights to Europe seem to be rather pricy - $1kish return is the cheapest I have found.
Upon entry you get a tourist visa. My first entry was in Tacna in the south from Chile. I got 90 days without any questions. My second entry was in Jorge Chavez, where the immigrations dude asked how long I was staying, I said I wasn't sure, and he gave me 6 months. Visa can be renewed anytime you want by doing a visa run to one of the neighbouring countries. I've heard talk about a $1/day fine for overstaying but I haven't looked into it. It would be a shame to go to Peru without visiting some of the other parts of the country, so a visa run should be no problem.

I realize I forgot to do a rating, but I don't even know what I'm comparing to. I would probably rate it highly in every area, with the caveat that Lima is a weird place for a Scandinavian where everything is "in order" and by the books. The cops are corrupt, the politicians are corrupt, the public transportation is a mess, the social inequality is causing a very weird dynamic where it's very easy to see the de facto segregation in pretty much every part of the country. There'll constantly be some ******* trying to screw you over if you look like a gringo, and that can be pretty annoying since you'll have to either bend over or spend a lot of time arguing over a dollar here and a dollar there just to avoid the constant feeling of being a sucker.
Luckily you can avoid most of the ******** because you're "rich" compared to the general population, but I wouldn't ever want to settle down and spent the rest of my life here, because that means you'll actually have to deal with all the ********. If you want to spend a couple of years on a tourist visa though, I think Lima is a great place to do that. This is all from a Danish perspective though. I'm used to live in a place where a corrupt cop is extremely rare, and a corrupt politician would create some serious outrage, so it's kind of hard for me to accept that that's just the way things are run here.
That said I absolutely love how nice people, excluding the *******s who try to squeeze the gringo lemon for its last drop, are here. If a day goes by and noone has stopped me in the street asking me where I'm from, what my country is like, if I like Peru, if I tried the ceviche, and so on it feels like a weird day. The Peruvians in general seem to be good people.

Excellent post. I enjoyed my time in Lima and I agree that Peru has a ****ton of stuff to do. Food was decent, people were nice, tons of stuff to do...Peru in general was one of my favorite S.A. countries.

Requesting more on Taipei,Thailand & Phillipines please

Wtf mate? It's safe here in Finland too and the police only fires (every shot incl. tires etc) in the line of duty sth like 15-20 times per year, but still it seems incredible that they don't even carry guns routinely?

I mean yeah you have a small country, and safe without a doubt, but you would think that they would carry a gun for 1) their own protection and 2) the proactive threat of firepower which you would think that lowers crime

2 big threads about thailand full of info imo

Yeah I understand this and very helpfull they are too.
I prefer this format however as it is more concise instead of sifting through thousand's of pages

great post. but what about womens?

Sydney, Australia

Firsthand experience? australian citizen and resident

Cost of Living - 1

living in sydney, and australia in general is very expensive, consistently in international top 10 lists.

a 2 BR house in the suburbs 30 minutes from the city will set u back easily $500/wk

nightlife is also VERY expensive

Recreation - 10

pretty much anything u can think of u can do here. its a city with something for everyone. very diverse environment (beach, rain forest, bush, forest).

more bars, clubs, restaurants etc than u could possibly see in a few months. theres always something going on in terms of music and festivals

How Scary? - 2

it depends on the area u are in, but generally speaking u wont have any problems. australia is a 1st world country and sydney has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. keep to urself and u'll have no problems. some parts of sydney u would be smart to avoid at night (parramatta, cabramatta for example).


Poker Playing -

a) live poker - 2

nonexistent outside of the casino (only 1), and the rake and game selection is awful. if u dont mind dealing with that and snappy, underpaid, overworked dealers u should do ok. i should point out that tournaments run regularly, the fee is relatively low and the structures are decent

b) online poker - 10

online poker is legal in australia, and defacto untaxed. pretty much everyone young has played at least a few times, very open

How Easy to Get There and Stay There? - 5

most western passport holders get a 3 month visa waiver. a 12 month tourist visa is fairly easy to obtain.

doing visa runs is going to be a problem. the border control for tourists is very strict (due to heaps people from SE asia staying here on tourist visas and working illegally), and they will definitely ask u why ur returning so soon. expect to be put back on a plane (annoying after 6 hours return from NZ)

Well, there seems to be plenty to go around and they definitely like gringos. The female Peruvian population in general probably won't win any prizes for their amazing beauty though, so it won't be like cruising down the main street in Copenhagen on a warm summer day.

If you're into paying for it, I'm pretty sure that's available as well.

Ecuador

Experience
My wife is Ecuadorian, and this was my first trip down there with her and her family. We stayed for 1.5 months, and virtually saw the entire country, living with locals. The country is divided into 3 very different regions. The coast, the sierra, and the oriente (Coast, mountains, and amazon). Each category will differ somewhat depending on the region you are in, but I will do my best to give a clear picture.

Cost of Living: 9
Travelling to Ecuador for the first time from Toronto, was comical when it came to costs. A quick rundown on prices (All USD): $0.60 bottled beers, $1.50 for a plate of rice w/ beans and a meat of your choice, cooked how you want it (typically from "hole in the wall" type places), if you go to the chain restaurants, expect $3-$4 for a full meal. 5-star equivalent restaurant we ate at, dinner for 4, chilean wine, steak w/ prawns type meals, bill came out to $65. $0.25 public transit, $8 bus ride across the country (9 hours), $4-$6 max taxi ride to get anywhere within the big cities. A condo we looked at in Salinas, amazing spacious 2 br, floor to ceiling glass sliding doors, on the coast overlooking beautiful beaches, $130,000. This condo anywhere in Toronto, or any city equivalent in costs, $500-600k easily. I hesitate to give this category a 10, because Ecuador is the first third-world/developing country I've visited.

Recreation: 10
Coast: The most undeveloped pristine coastline I've ever heard of or seen. Going out on a limb I'll say 95% of the coast has no human footprint. Every 10-20 kms driving along the coast, you will find small fishing villages, where you can spend an afternoon soaking it up on the beach, and the waves are decent to surf. Habitable places we stayed for longer periods, would include Salinas, Montanita, and Esmeraldas. All exotic beach locations, Montanita being party central (Babylonia as my inlaws called it). Sea-doo's and 4x4's are all readily available for rent. Guayaquil, the most populous city in Ecuador, is considered coastal. This city can be avoided, nothing much at all to do (This was our "home-base" for the majority of the trip).

Sierra: Quito and Cuenca, the 2nd and 3rd largest cities in Ecuador, are located in the Andean mountains. Both are at high altitudes, so the majority of physical recreation activities consists of hiking or biking. A town called Banos not too far from Quito, has all the extreme sports covered, including white water rafting, bungie jumping, hand-glidding, you name it. Babylonia of the sierra when the sun sets, as well.

Amazon: You can do amazon tours for a few nights, and stay in the rainforests, watch out for the penis fish.

How Safe: 5
Changed this heading, to avoid confusion. Everyone you speak with, over-emphasizes how unsafe it can be in Ecuador, including locals. From my experience, I didn't run into one hairy situation, and I ventured way off the beaten path, where I'm sure no gringos have been in years, if not ever. The people there looked at me more out of curiosity, rather then with criminal intent. The reason I'm giving this category a 5, is because I'm also 6'4, 260 lbs, and I'm assuming part reason why I wasn't bothered was because of this. At the same time I did see in the news, people who were killed in the streets only a few blocks over. Same goes for most travel, be smart and respectful, you should have no problems. Guayaquil was by far the "shadiest" city out of them all. Popular areas and touristy places are full of military and police, and from what I understand, the new president has cracked down hard to clean up any corruption in these organizations. You feel extra safe around them.

Poker Playing: B&M: 6 Online: 6
Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca, the 3 largest cities, each have one private poker club. I was only able to visit the two in Quito and Guayaquil, but had a great experience at both. Poker is still in its infancy over there, so most all of the players there had only been playing 0-3 years. Combined with a widespread lack of understanding poker math, made for very soft games. We played 1/2 and on weekends 5/5. Crushing 1/2 and 5/5 there over the 6-7 sessions I played, combined with cost of living, has me seriously considering returning. Gave this a 6 because of game selection, and locations.

The internet is slow to average at best. I didn't play online at all, but I talked to a bunch of people who did. I don't know the legalities for online poker there, but I'm going to assume it's legal, and if not, then it's the last thing on the authorities priority list.

How Easy to Get There and Stay There: 8
Daily flights from Miami $200 ish, and all other south american countries (didn't investigate for Europe). Return from Toronto was $800. Tourist visa was 90 days, and from what I understand can be renewed by leaving to peru/columbia for the day and returning, and getting another stamp. Same as many other places I've read about.



Oh, and BABES. Not as fine as Argentinian, or Puerto Ricans, but I still couldn't help myself from imagining them while making faithful love with my woman.

maybe 2-5% of the population smokes cancer, and not once did I run into any weed, or anyone smoking weed. You can find pure if you're looking for it.

Can you guys that posted about Peru and Equador please also tell us what rake they charge at the live poker rooms?

Thanks!